The Columnist

A letter in response to Larissa MacFarquhar’s article (March 1, 2010)

It says something about Krugman that, his open opposition to the Bush Administration aside, he was for much of his life unable to recognize political forces, or to judge their impact on the world, even within the realm of his discipline. It’s not surprising, then, that, when recounting his list of misses (Enron, the import of tax policy, self-regulating markets), he omits his record of being dead wrong about Obama. Krugman is a leading member of two great, insular tribes—the academic economists and the professional pundits. People in other tribes in this country, such as the working poor and the economically falling classes, seem to have an innate sense that things in Washington are meaningful to them, that they have a stake in how the government functions, even if they cannot reduce that sense to poetic modelling. What Obama brings to the table, in addition to his obvious intelligence and coolly determined demeanor, is an understanding of the meanings and impact of polices on the street level. Krugman seems to think that leadership is following the right charts. But no chart, no matter how cleverly beautiful, and no column, no matter how brilliantly distilled its reasoning, can take the place of leadership.